To be honest, I actually left because I ended up having mental health problems because of working at Revolut, to the point where I suffered from daily panic attacks and breathing problems, and ended up in hospital. I found that while working there I became more toxic and angry. Even my partner had noticed I was always stressed and severely unhappy. However, I'll try to be fair with the cons and provide explanation.
If you want to skip all the details I summarised the 7 points right at the bottom.
Cons:
General:
1) No work-life balance. You will work minimum 9-12 hours a day - I sometimes was in office till midnight or later. That's why they offer the perk of free UBER trips from the office to your house if you are in office past midnight. The perk is there for a reason. I'm not saying this is an objectively bad thing. Some people like this kind of lifestyle and that is fine, for me it wasn't great. In my opinion, this isn't a place you would want to work at if you want to maintain a life outside of work. Again, this is debatable depending on what you want out of life.
2) The culture is very toxic. Management (middle, senior, execs) view people as resources and not people. They say they are changing, and they will probably reply to this review saying 'They are working on it...', but trust me when I say: this is not a priority for the company. They are output driven, which means they don't care how the results are produced, as long as they are produced; even if that means working 15 hours a day, everyday.
When I was joining, I was assured that they are working on improving their culture and focusing on employees. This was not true, at all. Essentially, they just implemented a room with curtains that you can pull shut, where you could go if you were stressed to relax a bit. But here's the catch - since deadlines don't move and everything is output driven, - the longer you stayed in that room, the longer you had to stay after hours just to meet the demanding deadlines. Bottom line: it wasn't much help and this was Revolut's only solution to mental health problems in the work place, even after the hundreds of review comments via internal surveys and platforms like Glassdoor telling management, that the current work place is not sustainable for most people.
Just to summarise: you probably won't be seen as an individual unless you get to a level in management. BUT there are a small amount of teams which implement their own culture and phenomenal to work for... I just hope you get into one of these few teams, if not.... god bless you and good luck.
3) Management are way too inexperienced - most of the managers there aren't people who have experience in their role, but are in exec positions because they were early employees. This leads to certain problems:
- Young successful people in high positions are trying to prove that they deserve their exec levels, so they implement unreasonable targets and asks which people below have to run around and jump through hoops to meet.
- Just pure inexperience and lack of leadership and direction - sometimes it honestly feels like they don't know what they are doing and then saying they need something 10 mins before a meeting. There have been instances where management have agreed to implement something by a deadline only to find that they don't even have data to complete the task because management didn't discuss anything with the data people and just guessed if they had information or not. Which again means that people below have to bend over backwards.
- Just unprofessional - Its not uncommon for people to yell at each other there and management to get at each others throats because there is simply no communication between them (again: inexperience). Sometimes because of no experience management does not understand the weight of the words they write or say. They are senior managers and a lot of people look up them. They can be often inappropriate, and since they are young, they don't quite grasp that some of things they say can cause serious problems... I get that they are a start-up but if you want to be a bank (or just a respectable company), you should probably act with some more professionalism.
Again to summarise - young inexperienced people are in really high places here.
4) The concept of 'A-Players'. Revolut is obsessed with this term. Essentially they only want the best of the best to work for them. Don't misunderstand: they do not want to train and develop their employees to become A-players and grow. NOPE. They want people to be A-players right when they join. Whats-more, is that this terms has created a divide in the company into the 'GREATS' and the 'COMMONERS'. The greats being the A-players (people who have outstanding performance reviews and are only a small fraction of people in the company). The Peasants being the other 80% or so of the company. This divide is a serious psychological problem where you have to be in the ELITE group otherwise you are worthless in the company. It's so bad that it has come to the point that your feedback on internal surveys to improve Revolut doesn't carry much weight in the company unless you are one of these 'A-Players'. Its like a sad school drama show...
5) The general attitude of the company is 'We are amazing and you should be grateful to work for us'... This isn't a bad thing to some degree, it's good that they are proud of themselves, but I think it is blown way out of proportion. From the moment you apply to Revolut the attitude is on the arrogant side - they believe that they only deserve the best of the best - but what they do not understand is that an 'A-player' wants to work in an 'A-Class' company like Google, Microsoft or the other Tech Titans. It's evident from the company reviews and ratings on this platform and many others that the company is not at the level that they can demand just the A-players from around the world.
6) The compensation is good compared to the market (not by much). What you need to understand is that Revolut is in a league of its own: if you compare the amount of hours you work to the pay they give you, you will understand that you are actually being underpaid.
For example if you work at 2 companies ABC, XYZ.
ABC pay you £1000 a week but you work 45 hours a week (standard contract)
XYZ pay you £1200 a week but you work 60 hours a week (12 hours a day and pay a bit better than market)
ABC are paying you £22.22 an hour while XYZ are paying you £20 an hours.
Of course it is not always like this, but before you think that they are paying you more than your previous job, weigh up the pay in comparison to the extra level of work you will be doing (not to mention emotional abuse and potential mental health repercussions).
7) Line managers are quite poor here. Not everyone, but a lot of them are not qualified to be line managers. In my experience, they offer no support, and are very quick to blame you. My manager didn't even know what my career progression goals were, I was just a expendable resource to them. They are usually too busy for you, which they tend use as an excuse for not performing their line managing duties and proceed to blame you that you didn't 'manage upward enough' which is just another way of them getting out of their line managing duties. Even when you request a new line manager they refuse to let you go and change, because I guess it looks bad on them, so you end up stuck with a line manager that doesn't pay much attention to your growth.
My worst experience was when another team wanted me to work for them and I wanted to work for that team, only to be blocked by my current line manager telling me I can't go. Later I was in a meeting with other managers and my line manager, when my manager said:
"Some managers are bad, line managers shouldn't block someone's internal move to a team they are more suited to because people leave and then apply externally".
I just sat in that meeting honestly really upset about the situation since the same manager blocked my internal move and then made themselves seem like a thoughtful leader coming up with this solution, when in reality they were doing the exact thing they were preaching against. That was the final moment before I decided I can no longer work there. That and the series of panic attacks I had while working there, I could name other terrible things that happened but I think this review is long enough...
TO SUMMARISE
1) NO WORK-LIFE BALANCE
2) CULTURE IS TOXIC
3) MANAGEMENT IS YOUNG AND INEXPERIENCED
4) CONCEPT OF A-PLAYERS CREATES A CLASS SYSTEM IN THE COMPANY
5) REVOLUT HAS A PRETENTIOUS ATTITUDE
6) PAY IS NOT GOOD WHEN PUT IN PERSPECTIVE WITH THE HOURS WORKED
7) LINE MANAGERS CAN HONESTLY BREAK YOUR EXPERIENCE THERE AND BREAK YOU
